The cops had stumbled across a gangland convention* of
most of the top mob leaders in America.
The dons had been meeting, undetected and unperturbed,
every five years or so since 1931.

RFK HATED BY HOOVER & MAFIA

Within two weeks of taking office Kennedy had declared "war on crime".
He meant organized crime.
The greatest impediment to Kennedy's war on crime
was the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover.

ROBERT KENNEDY: HIS LIFE, by Evan Thomas
excerpts from pages 70-361:

...During an investigation into government procurement fraud in New York in 1955, Kennedy stumbled across the common practice of gangsters' extorting protection money from employers and unions. Kennedy became intrigued and he began asking federal investigators about extortion and racketeering. In those days, the FBI stayed away from mobsters. Fearing that his G-men might be corrupted by the mob, Hoover steadfastly denied the existence of organized crime. The Bureau of Narcotics was less fastidious and less blind. It was to the 'narcs' that Bobby first turned for a tour of the underworld...

Since at least the 1920s, the Sicilian Mafia had been exporting its trade to the United States. The mobsters entered the usual rackets--loan-sharking, extortion, prostitution, gambling, and during Prohibition, bootlegging. Some gangsters also moved into the potentially lucrative market for narcotics. In the mid 1950s, a pair of narcotics agents, Angelo Zurol and Joe Amato, put together an elaborate 'family tree' of the Sicilian mobsters who ran the strongest crime organizations. As he asked around about organized crime, Kennedy met Zurlo and Amato, who in turn introduced him to street agents. Bobby began riding at night, with narcotics agents on their raiding parties. 'He liked being a policeman,' recalled Howard Diller, a Bureau of Narcotics agent who would see Kennedy around headquarters downtown at 90 Church Street. 'And he loved Irish detectives.' The intelligence division of the New York Police Department was dominated by Irishmen. Self-consciously Irish, admiring Irish 'toughness,' Kennedy enjoyed the company of the NYPD detectives, who had a loose alliance with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Making ten or so busts a night, the Bureau of Narcotics used New York City cops to kick in doors...

Joyriding with the cops at night exposed Kennedy to a Runyonesque world of cops and thugs and hookers. Kennedy learned some street skills of survival...Kennedy's nocturnal ramblings among the lowlifes touched a side of Kennedy that had been well concealed. Sin held a fascination for the prudish son who, unlike his brothers, had been abstemious enough to win his father's $1,000 reward for not drinking or smoking until age twenty-one. Kennedy never bragged to friends about his bar-fighting triumphs; he kept his night life in New York well hidden from his family. In later years, his friends were slightly puzzled by Kennedy's fondness for colorful rogues; it seemed somehow out of character with the straightlaced moralist. But...Kennedy was drawn to the flame he wished to snuff out.

RFK was not out cruising into the small hours merely to flirt with danger or the pleasures of the night. He wanted to conquer evil. As he quizzed the narcs and the detectives in the intelligence division of the NYPD about criminals and their connections, he was getting at least a glimpse of the larger, darker forces behind street life in the city.

His education was furthered by newspapermen. Then, as now, congressional investigators often got their best tips from newspapermen...

He expanded the scope of the rackets investigation. In between chipping away at Hoffa, he had begun looking at the whole of organized crime. Not much was known in the mid-1950s. The word 'Mafia' had been used to describe the Italian crime families, but not widely. Kennedy was just asking a witness about the existence of the Mafia on November 13, 1957, when the next day local police in the upstate New York hamlet of Apalachin began wondering why there were so many limousines with out-of-state licenses parked outside a secluded estate. When the police approached, dozens of well-fed men with pinkie rings and dark glasses emptied out of the house and ran into the woods. The cops had stumbled across a gangland convention of most of the top mob leaders in America. The dons had been meeting, undetected and unperturbed, every five years or so since 1931. Hearing about the raid, Kennedy demanded FBI files on the conventioneers. He was shocked to find, he later said, that Hoover's men 'didn't know anything, really, about these people who were the major gangsters in the United States.' His friends over at the Bureau of Narcotics, by contrast, had 'something on every one of them.'

Kennedy decided to do some investigating of his own. Characters out of the movies, like Joseph 'Crazy Joey' Gallo, attired from head to toe in black, began raising their right hands on the Rackets Committee hearing room and then asserting their constitutional right to remain silent by 'taking the Fifth'. Kennedy was fascinated and even amused by the lowlifes of the underworld with their Runyonesque names like Cockeyed Dunn. When Joey Gallo visited Kennedy's office, he felt the rug and said, 'It would be nice for a crap game.' Kennedy bombarded them with questions, sometimes accompanied by sneers. The star witness was Momo Salvatore 'Sam' Giancana, heir to the Capone gang in Chicago. Giancana had hung people on meat hooks, but he was an upscale mobster who counted top entertainers among his friends, including Frank Sinatra. Questioned by Kennedy if he disposed of opponents by stuffing them in the trunk of a car, Giancana seemed amused. Kennedy was not.

Mr.KENNEDY: Would you tell us anything about any of your operations or will you just giggle
every time I ask you a question?Mr.GIANCANA: I decline to answer because I honestly believe my answer might
tend to incriminate me.MR.KENNEDY:I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.

Tense and awkward as a questioner at first, speaking in convoluted or incomplete sentences, Kennedy improved over time and gradually became a clear and forceful interrogator. He learned to be patient, and he was always tenacious. He developed a sly, mocking style. When a witness gave him a long-winded and obviously phony answer, a New York Times reporter observed, Kennedy 'reacted with a long, silent look and then grunted, 'Oh!' with an attitude of mock surprise. The witness shrugged his shoulders helplessly.' Kennedy played the bullyboy at times, especially when witnesses tried to take him on. 'Don't give me that shit,' a union boss swore at him under questioning. Kennedy, who was generally not profane, tried to goad him further. With the mike off, Kennedy kept hissing at the witness, 'You're full of shit.'...

Committee staff noted that RFK became 'a little keyed up, a little tense,' as one put it, on the rare occasions when Joseph Kennedy showed up in the hearing room to watch his son. But mostly they felt well led by Kennedy; indeed, most of Kennedy's large staff came to worship him...

Kennedy was careful not to fling around baseless charges or haul up witnesses before first checking out the allegations against them. It is true that Kennedy's scattershot method produced many more headlines than indictments. The evidence adduced at the hearings was rarely strong enough to prompt the cautious Eisenhower Justice Department to bring a criminal case. But no one has turned up any evidence of illegal over-reaching by Kennedy. FBI reports noted that Kennedy's committee employed a well-known wiretapper, but Hoover's men made no allegatons of warrantless eavesdropping....

At dinner on January 20, [1961] the newly inaugurated president jokingly told his friends, 'I don't know why people are so mad at me for making Bobby Attorney General. I just wanted to give him some legal experience before he practiced.'...

Within two weeks of taking office Kennedy had declared 'war on crime.' He meant organized crime. He wanted to find a way to prosecute the hoodlums he had summoned before the Rackets Committee. From his old allies in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, he had obtained a thick, black book on eight hundred mobsters. He handed the book to the task force of lawyers created to handle organized crime cases. 'Don't tell me what I can't do,' he instructed them. 'Tell me what I can do.'

The main obstacle was not Jimmy Hoffa or talented defense lawyers like Edward Bennett Williams, who represented the Teamsters and mob bosses like Sam Giancana. The greatest impediment to Kennedy's war on crime was the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. The Top G-man's resistance was passive and cunning, but it undermined Kennedy's effectiveness.

As RFK knew from his racket-busting days, Hoover had long denied the existence of a 'Mafia'. The FBI had instituted a Top Hoodlums Program after the raid at Apalachin exposed the meeting of a mob 'commission' in 1957. But when Kennedy took office the FBI was still lagging. In New York, Kennedy asked for the FBI's files on organized crime and got mostly newspaper clips. The New York office had four hundred agents out looking for communists and ten devoted to the mob. Kennedy was scornful. By 1961, the American Communist Party had only a few hundred members, Kennedy knew, and most of them were undercover FBI agents...

Having an activist attorney general, the president's brother to boot, made the director nervous...

The A.G. appeared unannounced in Hoover's office while the director was taking his afternoon nap. Kennedy had insisted on a direct phone link to Hoover...On several occasions, Kennedy had the temerity to 'buzz' Hoover to come to his office. This was not done to the director; in theory, Hoover reported to the attorney general, but in practice, attorneys general came to him.

Kennedy wanted to change the practice. In the beginning, he halfheartedly tried to pay court to Hoover, promising the director a private lunch once every couple of months with the president and calling him Edgar at staff meetings, but he could not hide his disdain. On some salutations, he actually crossed out the Edgar and wrote in Mr. Hoover. A chasm in style and attitude yawned between thirty-five-year-old Kennedy and the sixty-six-year-old director. Kennedy's informality in dress and habit grated on the compulsively orderly Hoover...Behind Hoover's back, Kennedy cursed the director and vowed that--after JFK was reelected--Hoover would be out of a job. The attorney general made cutting jokes about Hoover's faithful live-in assistant, Clyde Tolson. Told that Tolson had just undergone an operation, Kennedy quipped, 'What for? A hysterectomy?' [a gibe at Hoover's 'wife'...rumours were he was a practicing homosexual]. Ethel, ever the loyal prankster, did not help. After sparring with Hoover at a Justice Department reception she put an anonymous note in the FBI's 'suggestions' box proposing that the director be replaced by the Los Angeles police chief, William Parker, whom Hoover loathed.

Word inevitably got back to Hoover, who feared he might lose his job at any moment. Hoover understood that he could not simply refuse to do Kennedy's bidding on major enforcement initiatives, like organized crime. But he was determined to do it in his own way, under FBI control with minimal interference from the attorney general. An attorney general can prosecute--he or his minions can impanel grand juries and seek indictments--but only the FBI can investigate. Although Kennedy, over Hoover's fervent objections, brought the IRS, the Bureau of Narcotics, and other agencies into the crime fight, the attorney general was still dependent on Hoover's G-men for most investigations. It was up to Hoover to decide the best way to penetrate organized crime.

The method he chose was the use of electronic eavesdropping devices--so-called bugs. Hoover's men knew very little about the Mafia in 1961. A very quick way to catch up was to listen in on the private conversations of mobsters. It is estimated that during Bobby Kennedy's three years as attorney general, Hoover's men installed almost eight hundred bugs, usually by 'black bag jobs,' breaking into homes and bars and barbershops and planting the small transmitters under a chair or in a light socket. With an eye towards bureau aggrandizement and professional self-preservation, Hoover was more interested in gathering intelligence than bringing cases. Hoover saw the FBI as a rival to the CIA, not as a mere police force. He did some of his most effective spying on American public officials. The director was particularly eager to learn of mob ties to politicians, whom he could then blackmail. Hoover did not widely share the gleanings from these bugs, and when he did, FBI memos referred vaugely to 'extremely reliable sources' or 'informants'.

The legal authority for such blatant invasions of privacy was murky in the early '60s. Hoover claimed to have a blanket authorization dating from Kennedy's predecessors as far back as the FDR administration. Kennedy later insisted that he knew nothing about the bugging...

It is probable that Kennedy was not informed of specific acts of bugging, at least not in advance...By using bugs to gather intelligence on organized crime, Hoover compromised Kennedy's ability to prosecute criminals. None of the evidence collected by those bugs was admissible in court...When a bug was discovered in Las Vegas in 1963, it blew any chance of bringing cases against dozens of Las Vegas mobsters for illegal skimming operations. The most thoroughly bugged Mafia boss was Momo 'Sam' Giancana. But Giancana was never prosecuted by Kennedy...The FBI's main evidence against Giancana--his own admissions that he had murdered, bribed, and extorted--was unusable in a court of law. It had been gathered by illegal eavesdropping. Kennedy never let up on his push against Giancana or other top gangsters. But his ability to put them behind bars was severely constrained by the tactics used by his FBI colleague down the hall at the Justice Department...

Cracking the mob was Robert Kennedy's priority, not Hoover's. Hoover was paranoid as ever that Kennedy was about to fire him...Hoover was difficult to control, in part because Kennedy couldn't do his job without the FBI...

In the spring of 1961, the FBI director was under unrelenting pressure from the attorney general to stop dragging his feet on organized crime...

Giancana was enemy number one in RFK's new assault on the mob...At Kennedy's request, Giancana was a target of constant FBI surveillance and tax and criminal investigations. FBI files reflect incessant pressure from the attorney general to probe Giancana for federal crimes. Ever since their 1959 confrontation in the Rackets Committee hearing ('I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana'), Kennedy had regarded Giancana as the devil in a sharkskin suit. FBI agents recalled that on his visits to the bureau's field office in Chicago, the attorney general would barrage them with questions about the gangster who had achieved Capone's stature in the underworld. With 'the face of a gargoyle and the personality of a viper,' Giancana personified evil to RFK, who as ever saw his job in personal and moral terms. The mobster, 'was violent, crazy, unstable as an animal. He'd kill people for kicks. He wasn't like the Mafia leaders in New York,' said William Hundley, Kennedy's chief of the organized crime section. Kennedy was determined to behead the Mafia leadership....

Giancana was never indicted by the Kennedy Justice Department. Prosecuting Giancana under federal law was always going to be difficult...Lacking the anti-racketeering laws of a later age, the feds had to stretch to find jurisdiction over crimes like murder and extortion. Kennedy had initially hoped to bring a tax case against Giancana, along the lines of the prosecution that finally sent Giancana's infamous predecessor, Al Capone, to jail in the 1930s. But a mole was discovered in the IRS leaking information on Giancana, who had already learned to evade the tax man by leaving no paper trail (the mobster used cash and declared $50,000-$90,0000 'miscellaneous' income on his taxes). The evidence of other crimes gathered from the FBI's bugs was unusable. The FBI could continue to harass Giancana with round-the-clock surveillance--at Kennedy's prodding, agents began to follow the gangster right onto the golf course--but the Justice Department could not bring him to court....

Perhaps the most important investigation of organized crime was in Las Vegas, where the mob was skimming the nightly take from the casinos and sending the money to bosses in Chicago and Miami. The FBI had been bugging the hotels but, with typical insularity not sharing its intelligence with other investigative agencies including the IRS. The attorney general wanted to investigate the mob-controlled casinos for tax evasion. In the spring of 1963, Kennedy finally insisted that Hoover send him a report on casino skimming that could be passed along to other agencies. The skimming report arrived at the criminal division of the Justice Department on Wednesday, April 24, 1963--and, incredibly, leaked right back to the mob by Monday. FBI agents, monitoring the bureau's bugs in the casinos, listened in horror as mobbed-up casino owners read aloud from the FBI's highly confidential report. The leak, never adequately explained, was a tremendous setback to the war on organized crime. It effectively blew any chance of making criminal cases in Las Vegas--indeed, the casino owners sued the FBI for violating their civil liberties. And it alerted the mob that the FBI was listening, making gangsters more circumspect and sensitive to hidden microphones. The blame for this fiasco went back and forth. Hoover insisted that the leaks proved that the Kennedys could not be trusted, insinuating that the attorney general himself was conspiring with gangsters. Kennedy's aides suspected a convoluted Machiavellian ploy by Hoover: anticipating that the mob would soon discover the bugs and blame the FBI, he had leaked their existence in a way that allowed him to blame the Justice Department.

While the feds were finger-pointing over the wreck of their most promising organized crime investigation, they were also squabbling over who deserved public recognition for uncovering the mob. In 1962, a gangster named Joe Valachi broke the code of omerta and began spilling the Mafia's secrets to federal investigators. Kennedy wanted to make a public show of Valachi and his story to prove, once and for all, that the Mafia truly existed as a force for evil. Before Kennedy could move, however, Hoover ordered up an article for Reader's Digest giving the bureau credit for discovering La Cosa Nostra, the Italian nickname that the FBI liked to use for the Mafia. Kennedy's spokesman, Ed Guthman, blocked the FBI publicity grab as too revealing of government secrets while the attorney general was feeding the more revealing Valachi story to writer Peter Maas of the Saturday Evening Post, who had come across the story through his own independent digging. Hoover was furious. 'I never saw such skullduggery,' he wrote on a May 23 FBI memo complaining that Kennedy's aides were 'exploiting this whole situation for their own benefit.'...

From time to time, Robert Kennedy was required to weigh the risk of his own death, and the death of his brother, at the hand of an assassin. FBI wiretaps would pick up occasional threats from irate mobsters, usually loose talk but nonetheless unsettling. That July, the FBI eavesdroppers had listened as Sam Giancana and several of his pals discussed playing golf. They all knew that JFK played golf; one mafioso asked if Bobby Kennedy did. Someone else suggested putting a bomb in the president's golf bag and the man laughed. After years of operating in secrecy and relative impunity, the Mafia bosses were bitterly complaining about pressure from the feds--a credit to the attorney general's persistence. The mob knew that the Kennedys, not Hoover, were to blame. On October 31, Buffalo, New York, mob boss Peter Maggadino railed into a hidden microphone, 'They should kill the whole family, the mother and father, too!' The record does not make clear whether the threats were ever passed on to RFK....

RFK was fearless, but by the autumn of 1963 he was also tired, as he put it, 'of chasing people.' He had grown weary of dealing with Hoover. 'I think the bitterness between him and J. Edgar Hoover took away a lot of the pleasure he got out of the Department of Justice,' said his friend Gerald Tremblay. Kennedy did not expect to be attorney general in his brother's second term. They had begun to talk about removing Dean Rusk as secretary of state and giving his job to Bob McNamara. RFK was an obvious candidate to succeed McNamara at the Pentagon.

First, however, RFK had to get his brother reelected...

On November 20, RFK turned thirty-eight. With deep lines around his eyes and flecks of gray in his sandy mop, he looked at once boyish and prematurely aged. At a surprise birthday party thrown for him at the Justice Department, he was in a particularly sardonic mood...Walking to the elevator afterwards, two of his top aides, John Douglas and Ramsey Clark, speculated that Kennedy would not be attorney general much longer. Douglas said that he thought Kennedy looked depressed. The birthday dinner at Hickory Hill that night was bright and lively, but Ethel gave an uncharacteristically subdued toast, simply raising her glass 'to the president'. As Byron White left, she said, 'It's all going too perfectly.'

J. Edgar Hoover never called Robert Kennedy at home, so Kennedy knew right away that something was wrong. At 1:45 p.m. on November 22, 1963, RFK was summoned to the phone as he sat, eating a tuna fish sandwich with some Justice Department officials, on the patio at Hickory Hill. The day was warm and Indian-summery; Kennedy had swum in his pool that morning. Taking the telephone receiver, he identified himself and heard the FBI director intone, 'I have news for you. The President's been shot'. Kennedy asked if the wound was serious. Hoover said he believed so and would call when he knew more. Then he hung up.' [Kennedy later famously described Hoover's lack of emotion.]

Kennedy's face contorted. He clapped his hand to his mouth and turned away. Ethel came and put her arms around him. He could not speak. Finally he forced out, 'Jack's been shot. It may be fatal'. The phone began ringing ceaselessly. 'there's been so much hate,' Kennedy muttered, wandering from one phone extension to another. To Ed Guthman, he said, 'I thought they'd get one of us . . . I thought it would be me.'...

As he worked the phones and greeted family and friends, Kennedy never lost his composure, though Ethel handed him dark glasses to cover his red-rimmed eyes. When Hoover phoned around 2:30 p.m. and flatly declared, 'The president is dead', Kennedy turned to Ethel and said, 'He had the most wonderful life.' He embraced his children as they returned from school and gently comforted them. His grace was touching, but a veneer. Grief would descend over Kennedy like a veil. In time, from long suffering would come transcendence and wisdom. But first, in the aftershock, Kennedy was seized by a desire to know who killed his brother.

Kennedy called CIA director John McCone and asked him to come to Hickory Hill, a few minutes away from agency headquarters in Langley. Bluntly, Kennedy asked the nation's top intelligence officer if the CIA had killed President Kennedy. The deeply Catholic McCone swore the agency was innocent...

So many enemies, so many potential assassins: Southern bigots, Jimmy Hoffa. The Mafia. Castro. Kennedy called Walter Sheridan, who was in Nashville prosecuting Hoffa for jury tampering, and asked him to start making discreet inquiries (Hoffa was pleased at the news, Sheridan reported back, but not guilty). Kennedy himself spoke to Julius Draznin, a National Labor Relations Board lawyer in Chicago, who had good sources in the underworld. Draznin was part of an informal intelligence network, maintained by RFK, a widespread web that included detectives in the Los Angeles Police Department, agents in the intelligence division of the IRS, and numerous journalists...Now Kennedy asked the well-wired labor lawyer to find out whether the mob had shot his brother. 'He was very subdued, low key,' sad Draznin. 'He asked me, 'Do you have any angles on this? Can you tap in on this?' He wanted to know about Giancana. I called him back in a couple of days. There was nothing.'

At twilight the shadows lengthened across Hickory Hill. RFK changed his shirt and headed for Andrews Air Force Base, to bring home his slain brother and widowed sister-in-law...

On Monday morning, the day of the funeral, RFK was somber and composed. Outside St Matthew's, when little John F. Kennedy Jr. raised his tiny hand to salute his slain father, RFK's face could be seen constricting in pain...

Robert Kennedy seemed devoured by grief. He literally shrank, until he appeared wasted and gaunt...On Thanksgiving he could not bear to return to Hyannis Port...He went to his office in a trance and did no work...After all those months of hectoring prosecutors to 'get moving' on organized crime, he appeared to lose all interest in the underworld on November 22. Kennedy had been discussing strategies for attacking the mob with Manhattan U.S. Attorney Robert Morgenthau poolside at Hickory Hill when the call came from Hoover. 'I saw him often after that, but he never mentioned organized crime to me again,' said Morgenthau...

Without question, he worried that his own aggressive pursuit of evil men had brought evil upon his own house. His close friends, like Mary Bailey Gimbel from Milton days, could sense the denial and read the clues. Gimbel noticed that RFK never used the word 'assassination,' and when he saw his brother's face on the cover of a magazine, he turned the picture over, as if he could not bear the sight. It was Gimbel who observed that RFK was affected most by one poem in the well-thumbed poetry collection he began lugging around after his brother's death--the Gerard de Nerval poem about the man who walked a lobster on a leash because the lobster knew 'the secrets of the deep.' Kennedy had his own deep secrets...

Kennedy's determination to find out who killed his brother, so purposeful in the first few hours after the shooting, seemed to shut down in the winter of 1964. Possibly, RFK did not want to learn where the trail led. Certainly, he had no interest in the public investigation of the death of the president, the Warren Commission... In September, the Warren Commission issued its findings: Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, had murdered President Kennedy. RFK later told an aide that he regarded the Warren Commission report as a public relations exercise to reassure the public. The public, at least initially, accepted the commission's conclusions. Though Kennedy gave lip service to the single-gunman explanation, he never quieted his own doubts...

Kennedy tended to be fatalistic about threats, generally refusing to use bodyguards or take much of any security precaution. But he could not free himself of the worry that his brother had been killed by a mobster whose real enemy was himself. In New Orleans Walter Sheridan quickly determined that Jim Garrison was a fraud and a publicity seeker. He even brought a defector from Garrison's camp up to Washington, to Kennedy's Senate office in order to tell RFK in person, that the New Orelans district attorney was not believable. Kennedy was only partly reassured. He doubted that the Cubans had killed his brother--but he continued to worry about the mob and about one mobster in particular.

Carlos Marcello, the don of New Orleans had a fierce grievance against RFK. He was high on the list of Mafia bosses targeted by Kennedy in 1961, up there with Giancana and other 'Top Hoodlums'. During the first months of the Kennedy administration, Marcello had been deported from the United States, essentially kidnapped and left in the jungles of Guatamala. The mobster made his way back to the United States and hired a better lawyer, but he believed that the attorney general had been out to persecute him. He had reputedly vowed to get even. ('Don't worry about that little Bobby son of a bitch, he's going to get taken care of.') One night during the summer of '67, RFK, in a rare moment of disclosure, told Richard Goodwin that he thought his brother had been killed by 'the guy from New Orleans' meaning Marcello. His suspicions may have been fed by something told to him by Walter Sheridan, who had spent months looking into Marcello and his connections while working on the Garrison story. Sheridan, who, according to his wife, contemplated suicide when his hero RFK was killed in 1968, refused to talk abut JFK's assassination until just before he died in 1996. Then he shocked his son, Walter Jr., by stating that he was 'convinced' that President Kennedy had been killed by a conspiracy. Joseph Kennedy II, RFK's oldest son, had a similar experience. In the last year of his life, RFK told his son that the full truth about the Kennedy assassination would never be known. Young Kennedy had the impression that his father knew something others did not, though exactly what remained a mystery...

After Kennedy's announcement--'I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man, but to propose new policies...'--he flew to New York to march in the St Patrick's Day Parade. Beforehand, he went to see Jacqueline Kennedy...On this cloudy March day, Jackie Kennedy smiled and gently kissed RFK and wished him on his way. A few days later, she took Arthur Schlesinger aside at a dinner party. 'Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby?' she said. 'The same thing that happened to Jack . . . There is so much hatred in this country, and more people hate Bobby than hated Jack . . . I've told Bobby this, but he isn't fatalistic, like me.' She knew perfectly well that her brother-in-law was fatalistic. Down on Fifth Avenue, on the St. Patrick's Day Parade route, Kennedy's old spokesman, Ed Guthman, quietly summoned Peter Maas, the writer, and a couple of other journalists friendly to Kennedy, to walk along close by RFK as he waved to the crowd. Maas realized that the newsmen had been formed into a kind of human shield. 'Guthman was afraid some nut would take a shot at Bobby,' Maas recalled...[end of quoting from Robert Kennedy: His Life, by Evan Thomas; Touchstone, New York, New York; 2000]